This book makes an original contribution to reconnecting criminological inquiry to the core concerns of the classical sociological imagination and to the intellectual resources of comparative and historical sociology. Throughout the book Hughes challenges the long-standing division of labour in criminology and sociology more generally between ‘theory’, ‘method’ and ‘research’. Accordingly, the author’s concerns here are as much about the craft and working methods of being a sociological criminologist as it is about theory and concepts. In the first half of the book, the key conceptual and methodological premises of the classical sociological tradition are outlined and the latter’s potential for revitalizing contemporary criminological research-theorizing are assessed. These chapters also address the debate regarding the relationship between crime and violence, and that of modernity and the Western ‘civilizing process’. In the second half of the book, three areas of current criminological inquiry are explored through the lens of the long-term, process-oriented and radically relational perspective of contemporary Weberian and Eliasian scholarship. Among the areas of comparative investigation explored here are street crime, gangs and urban violence, genocide and murderous ethnic cleansing, warfare, colonialism and human rights. Written in a clear and direct style this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology and all those interested in what a sociological lens brings to the practices of contemporary criminology.

This book makes an original contribution to reconnecting criminological inquiry to the core concerns of the classical sociological imagination and to the intellectual resources of comparative and historical sociology. Throughout the book Hughes challenges the long-standing division of labour in criminology and sociology more generally between 'theory', 'method' and 'research'. Accordingly, the author's concerns here are as much about the craft and working methods of being a sociological criminologist as it is about theory and concepts. In the first half of the book, the key conceptual and methodological premises of the classical sociological tradition are outlined and the latter's potential for revitalizing contemporary criminological research-theorizing are assessed. These chapters also address the debate regarding the relationship between crime and violence, and that of modernity and the Western 'civilizing process'. In the second half of the book, three areas of current criminological inquiry are explored through the lens of the long-term, process-oriented and radically relational perspective of contemporary Weberian and Eliasian scholarship. Among the areas of comparative investigation explored here are street crime, gangs and urban violence, genocide and murderous ethnic cleansing, warfare, colonialism and human rights. Written in a clear and direct style this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology and all those interested in what a sociological lens brings to the practices of contemporary criminology.

True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least "all [be] miserable together." The "murder leisure industry," its media, and its public: these modern styles of violence and intimacy, sociality and belief, are the subjects of True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers—and tests out—work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori—work yet to make its impact on the American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory. With examples, factual and fictional, of the scene of the crime ranging from Poe to CSI, from the true crime writing of the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami to versions of "the violence-media complex" in the work of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith and the Argentinian author Juan José Saer, True Crime is a penetrating look at modern violence and the modern media and the ties that bind them in contemporary life.

This multi-disciplinary anthology explores the topic of violence from a wide variety of perspectives. It looks at state violence, anti-state violence and criminal violence such as armed robbery.

A law professor and former prosecutor reveals how inconsistent ideas about violence, enshrined in law, are at the root of the problems that plague our entire criminal justice system—from mass incarceration to police brutality. We take for granted that some crimes are violent and others aren’t. But how do we decide what counts as a violent act? David Alan Sklansky argues that legal notions about violence—its definition, causes, and moral significance—are functions of political choices, not eternal truths. And these choices are central to failures of our criminal justice system. The common distinction between violent and nonviolent acts, for example, played virtually no role in criminal law before the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet to this day, with more crimes than ever called “violent,” this distinction determines how we judge the seriousness of an offense, as well as the perpetrator’s debt and danger to society. Similarly, criminal law today treats violence as a pathology of individual character. But in other areas of law, including the procedural law that covers police conduct, the situational context of violence carries more weight. The result of these inconsistencies, and of society’s unique fear of violence since the 1960s, has been an application of law that reinforces inequities of race and class, undermining law’s legitimacy. A Pattern of Violence shows that novel legal philosophies of violence have motivated mass incarceration, blunted efforts to hold police accountable, constrained responses to sexual assault and domestic abuse, pushed juvenile offenders into adult prisons, encouraged toleration of prison violence, and limited responses to mass shootings. Reforming legal notions of violence is therefore an essential step toward justice.

Along with most of the rest of Western culture, has crime itself become more "civilized"? This book exposes as myths the beliefs that society has become more violent than it has been in the past and that violence is more likely to occur in cities than in rural areas. The product of years of study by scholars from North America and Europe, The Civilization of Crime shows that, however violent some large cities may be now, both rural and urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were far more violent during the late Middle Ages than any cities are today. Contributors show that the dramatic change is due, in part, to the fact that violence was often tolerated or even accepted as a form of dispute settlement in village-dominated premodern society. Interpersonal violence declined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as dispute resolution was taken over by courts and other state institutions and the church became increasingly intolerant of it. The book also challenges a number of other historical-sociological theories, among them that contemporary organized crime is new, and addresses continuing debate about the meaning and usefulness of crime statistics. CONTRIBUTORS: Esther Cohen, Herman Diederiks, Florike Egmond, Eric A. Johnson, Michele Mancino, Eric H. Monkkonen, Eva Österberg, James A. Sharpe, Pieter Spierenburg, Jan Sundin, Barbara Weinberger

This remarkable and thoughtful book examines some of the most shattering events in recent history, from the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to mass murder in Sabra and Shatila, from the hijacking of the "Achille Lauro" to torture and murder by officials of the state. In each case Cassese tries to understand why states--Nietzsche's "cold-hearted monsters"--acted as they did, and what this bodes for the future. Cassese also raises questions of a more general legal and political kind: why do states use force with impunity? Is the first use of nuclear weapons prohibited by international law? Should one obey superior orders and perform a criminal act, as Abraham was prepared to do, or should one respect the moral laws of one's people, as Antigone did? The picture of world events presented here is vivid, and Cassese's analysis is clear and provocative. This is a book not only for students of politics, law, and international affairs, but also for general readers who wish to observe the actions of the state with as much objectivity as possible.

This follow-up volume to Dr. Stone's The Anatomy of Evil presents compelling evidence that, since a cultural tipping-point in the 1960s, certain types of violent crime have emerged that in earlier decades never or very rarely occurred. The authors examine the biological and psychiatric factors behind serial killing, serial rape, torture, mass and spree murders, and other severe forms of violence. In addition, they persuasively argue that, in at least some cases, a collapse of moral faculties contributes to the commission of such heinous crimes, such that "evil" should be considered not only a valid area of inquiry, but sometimes an imperative one. Returning to his groundbreaking scale for the ranking of degrees of evil, Dr. Stone and Dr. Brucato, a fellow violence and serious psychopathology expert, provide more detail than ever before, using dozens of cases associated with the twenty-two categories along the continuum. They also consider the effects of new technologies, as well as sociological, cultural, and historical factors since the 1960s that may have set the stage for new forms of violence. Further, they explain how personality, psychosis, and other qualities can meaningfully contribute to particular crimes, making for many different motives. Relying on their extensive clinical experience, and examination of writings and artwork by infamous serial killers, these experts offer many insights into the logic that drives horrible criminal behavior, and they discuss the hope that in the future such violence may be prevented.

Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what—or who—must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? We have inherited a model of marriage so flawed, Frances E. Dolan contends, that its logical consequence is conflict. Dolan ranges over sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature, sensational accounts of "true crime," and late twentieth-century marriage manuals and films about battered women who kill their abusers. She reads the inevitable Taming of the Shrew against William Byrd's diary of life on his Virginia plantation, Noel Coward's Private Lives, and Barbara Ehrenreich's assessment in Nickel and Dimed of the relationship between marriage and housework. She traces the connections between Phillippa Gregory's best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl and documents about Anne Boleyn's fatal marriage and her daughter Elizabeth I's much-debated virginity. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own time, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious individuals assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other. In an era when marriage remains hotly contested, this book draws our attention to one of the histories that bears on the present, a history in which marriage promises both intimate connection and fierce conflict, both companionship and competition.

The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, one of the most canonical figures of literary modernism, in order to reclaim an aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Works of modern literature are commonly theorized as symptomatic responses to the trauma of history. In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over critique, Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literary experience in terms that recall its contestatory potential. Examining Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focus of critical attention toward an account of modernism as an active engagement with violence, specifically the violence of history in nineteenth-century France. Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditional hallmarks of modernism—irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and formalism—to challenge the historical violence of modernity. Baudelaire and the committed ironists writing in his wake teach us how to read and resist the violence of history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy tenor of our contemporary "wound culture." In a series of provocative readings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry as an aesthetic form that contests historical violence through rhetorical strategies of complicity, counterviolence, and critique. The book develops a new account of Baudelaire's significance as a modernist by dislodging him both from his traditional status as a practitioner of "art for art's sake" and from his more recent incarnation as the poet of trauma. Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry, Sanyal in later chapters considers a number of authors influenced by his strategies—including Rachilde, Virginie Despentes, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—to examine the relevance of their interventions for our current climate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that underscores how Baudelaire's legacy continues to energize literary engagements with the violence of modernity.